School Projects – Life of the Rookie Teacher

Personification Superheroes & Ice Cream

February 1, 2020February 1, 2020Posted in Education, UncategorizedTagged Creative Writing, Creativity, Elementary School, Elementary School Teacher, Figurative Language, Ice Cream Party, IXL, IXL Math, Math, Math Love, Personification, School, School Fun, School Incentives, School Life, School Projects, Teacher, Teacher Blog, Teacher Blogs, Teacher Life, Teacher Love, Teacher Resources, Teacher Win, Teachers of Instagram, TeachersPayTeachers, Teaching, Teaching Blog, Teaching Blogs, Teaching Life, Teaching Love, Teaching Techniques, Writing1 Comment

Oh man it has been a LONG week! My kids were very good this week but my schedule was so jam packed, I barely had time to relax and enjoy their behavior.

In the winter, from November-February, I’m coaching gymnastics AND judging gymnastics. Because of that, I am usually working late every night and, about one time a week, I’m working so late I don’t get home until 11:00. The difference about this week however, is that we had 2 home meets which meant that I was home late TWICE this week. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot but not getting home until after 10 on a week night is rough once but doing it twice is SO HARD!!!!

Besides being exhausted out of my mind, I was still able to give my kids a structured but fun week. This week in reading we were talking about personification. We’ve touched on this before but this week it was going to be a focus on their story of the week’s comprehension quiz. Thursday was the day I had scheduled to really focus on this.

I wanted to find something super fun and beneficial to teach this, so naturally, I went to my love TPT and found a FREE resource (my absolute favorite!) I found this personification packet created by Creative Classroom Core and made some personification superheroes!

The task was for each student to think of an inanimate object that they use in their everyday lives. They then had to turn that object into a superhero by being very detailed using personification. They had SO MUCH FUN!! These turned out SO WELL. It also did the trick because when I graded their weekly comprehension quizzes today, NOT A SINGLE STUDENT got the personification questions wrong. Talk about a teacher win!

One more fun little thing we did this week was have a small reward ice cream party!!

IMG_1307 copy — Are these not the cutest math rockstars you’ve ever seen?

Our school utilizes IXL math and language arts. For every unit in math, we create BINGO boards that has 25 different IXL assignments for them to complete that correlates directly with the unit we are teaching. I gave my class their boards 3 weeks ago and told them it was due this past Monday. If a student got a BINGO, they got a candy bar. If they got a blackout however, they got to be invited to our ice cream party at lunch. These boards are completely optional but I do tell them if they get a BINGO they get a prize but if they get a blackout, they will be rewarded greatly for it. My other students were so jealous of the kiddos that got ice cream, that I have a feeling a lot more of my students will be getting blackouts on our next board. I HIGHLY recommend utilizing IXL if your school has it. If not, recommend it to your administration because it is incredible and promotes amazing review and practice! (Plus, students LOVE it!)

Oh boy has it been a LONG week, I am so ready to sleep and not set an alarm for the morning! Have a wonderful weekend teacher friends. Until next week.

For more day to day action, go follow my teacher Instagram page @lifeoftherookieteacher!!

New Hair, Who Dis?

January 25, 2020January 25, 2020Posted in Education, UncategorizedTagged 4th Grade Life, 4th Grade Teacher, Accelerated Reader, AR, Elementary School, Elementary School Teacher, Love Teaching, School, School Fun, School Life, School Projects, School Stress, Student Treasures Publishing Company, Studentreasures, Teacher, Teacher and Student, Teacher Blog, Teacher Blogs, Teacher Life, Teacher Resources, Teaching, Teaching Blog, Teaching Blogs, Teaching Life, Teaching Love, Teaching Techniques1 Comment

This has been an INSANE week with my kids!! We had Monday off for MLK Jr. day, so I was thinking it’d be an easy week. I was wrong. They were not ready to be at school Tuesday morning and it lasted 3 full days.

I have an AMAZING class this year, but for some reason they forgot what being a respectful student looks like. We had multiple incidents where they wouldn’t be listening or they would do the complete opposite of what I said (which, yes I know that’s nothing but that’s not my class!) Yesterday, multiple things happened that I can’t even believe. I had kids fighting by the lockers with their boots as weapons, messing around with food and talking back to paras in the lunch room, and kids stealing snack out of other kids’ lockers. It was definitely not them!

I was so done at the end of the day that I went off on them! I yelled, which is not me. I also sent an email home to all parents telling them what a rough day it was and I had an incredible response! Luckily, I have great parents this year (which explains why my class has been so great) so they 110% had my back and I could tell talked to their kids last night because today was like the past few days never happened. They were their old selves again.

Besides the rough behavior, we had a good week because they got to create their own book. Last school year, I shared how my 3rd graders made their own book from a company called Studentreasures. (Yes, there is only 1 “t” and it’s only one word.) I had scheduled to create our book this year this week because of the 4 day week. (and because we are 4 weeks ahead in reading compared to the rest of the grade….again, because these kids are amazing!) They had so much fun and it was amazing! I can’t wait to share with you the final product when they come in the mail. If you’ve never looked up this company before, look it up! It’s amazing and totally free for the teacher and school! I am so excited to see the final published product!

Today was an extra interesting/fun day because of one incredible student in my class. At our school, we do Accelerated Reader (AR) to promote reading. I motivate my students by having incentives for reaching a certain amount of points. I created my incentives back in the summer (when I thought I was still going to be a 3rd grade teacher) so I created incentives up to 400 points (which I thought wouldn’t happen in 3rd grade.) Of course, I have the top reader in the grade in my class this year so she reached (and has since, proceeded) 400 points. The incentive I have for 400 points is the student gets to dye my hair whatever color they choose. This awesome student reached 400 and got to pick the color she wanted. Today we got to celebrate her achievement and had the whole class watch!

It was super fun and I was so happy for her! My hair was not a fan but I bought a dye that washes out right away so no damage done (but they don’t know that!) I definitely went home and took a shower ASAP but they thought it was the best thing ever! #TeacherWin! It did turn my mood around for the week!

For more day to day action, go follow my teacher Instagram page @lifeoftherookieteacher!!

Blogmas Day 2 “Books of the Season” AND Reindeer Writing Fun!

December 13, 2019December 13, 2019Posted in Blogmas 2019, UncategorizedTagged 12daysofchristmas, 4th Grade Life, 4th Grade Teacher, blogmas, Books of the Season, Christmas, Christmas Blog, Christmas Break, Christmas Countdown, Creative Writing, Instagram, Jan Brett, Life of the Rookie Teacher, Love, Reindeer Writing, School Fun, School Life, School Projects, Teacher Blog, Teacher Blogs, Teacher Life, Teaching Blogs1 Comment

Blogmas Day 2 Books of the Season:

Oh boy, when I think of books of the season all I can think about are my favorite Christmas picture books that I read daily to my students at school. I have SO MANY favorite books of the season that I have enough books to read 1-2 different picture books everyday to my kids from Thanksgiving until Christmas break. I’ll share the list of books (and activities) I do with my class below.

When I think about the books of the season I also think about a single author who holds a very special place in my heart…Jan Brett. Her books were always ones that my mom would read to my sister and I every night until Christmas. When I see her books, I instantly begin to think about the holiday season.

I know that some people are probably going to share their favorite novels or adult texts, but Christmas isn’t Christmas without some good old picture books and lucky for me, my job lets me read them on a daily basis!

School 15 Day Holiday Picture Book List:

Want to participate in Blogmas 2019? Check out the following guidelines!

Last year you might have followed along with the 12 Days that I did with some of the gals listed above and we had such a good time that we decided to celebrate again together this year! So without further ado here are the guidelines for my 12 Days of Christmas.

use the image provided in each post, so that way anyone who might jump in later can see what the plan is for the month.
for sure link back to me, Abbey@ThreeCatsandaGirl, so that way I can celebrate your Christmas with you and maybe get some ideas of how to create festive enjoyment!
spread Christmas cheer in the way you know best!

Reindeer Writing:

Speaking of Jan Brett, her books always inspire my favorite December lessons/activities at school. On Wednesday I read one of my favorite of her books, The Wild Christmas Reindeer, and then did a fun creative writing project. If you’ve never read this story before, it’s a great book to teach kids about how to be respectful and how being “bossy” doesn’t always work out well.

The main character in the story is an elf who has to get Santa’s reindeer trained and ready to go for the Christmas Eve flight. After our story we brainstormed ideas on what they would do if they had to train a reindeer, whether to be one of Santa’s or to just train them as a pet. They had the best ideas!

After they wrote out their ideas, they drew a picture of them training their reindeer and then they colored and cut out a reindeer head and hooves to mount their writing on.

They all turned out so cute! I love this project. It gets them to practice their writing while also incorporating art and Christmas, some of my favorite things!

Oh man it’s been a crazy, long, and exhausting week. I am ready for the weekend but I’m even more ready for Christmas break to begin one week from today! We’re almost there teachers, we can do this!

For more day to day activities and live action, go follow my blog/teacher Instagram page @lifeoftherookieteacher!

Happy Thanksgiving From 4th Grade

November 28, 2019November 28, 2019Posted in Education, UncategorizedTagged 4th Grade Life, Life of the Rookie Teacher, Love My Job, Math Stations, School Life, School Projects, Teacher, Teacher Blog, Teacher Blogs, Teacher Life, Teacher Love, TeachersPayTeachers, Teaching Blog, Teaching Blogs, Thankful, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Crafts, Why are you thankful, WritingLeave a comment

Happy Thanksgiving blog friends. It has been a wonderful day for my family and myself, so I really hope your day has been fantastic too. Even though we are on Thanksgiving break, and when we get back to school on Monday the holiday festivities will begin, I still wanted to share with all of you the fun things we did at school and the great resources I found.

For our school, we only had classes on Monday and Tuesday this week, so it was a quick couple of days. Because it was such a short week, I didn’t really want to start anything new in reading or math so I had 2 days to fill.

On Monday we spent our reading time working on our letter writing skills. I wanted to implement the theme of thankfulness into the week so my plan was to write thank you letters to our Scholastic book sponsors. Every month, Scholastic book clubs have $1.00 books. This past summer I was looking for anyone who would be willing to donate $9.00 so one student in my class could get a free book every month. I was fortunate enough to find 24 sponsors so each of my kiddos have the chance to get a free book every month this whole school year. The kiddos were all super excited to give their thanks and share a little about themselves to their sponsors. The writing took most of our reading time and the rest of our “down time” during the day but it was so worth it! I’ve sent out a few of the letters so far and the response from my friends and family is amazing. They think it’s super sweet that these kids wrote to them to thank them for their kindness.

For math Monday (and Tuesday) I wanted to do something fun. We finished our 2nd math unit last week so I didn’t want to start anything new when the kids won’t be back for almost a week. I decided to search TPT for Thanksgiving math activities and created 8 different Thanksgiving themed math stations for them to do throughout the 2 days. I had small groups of 3 and gave them 15 minutes at each station. They got to 4 on Monday and 4 on Tuesday. I wanted to review the skills we’ve learned so far this year so my activities ranged from multiplication to place value.

The best part about all of these activities is that they are all FREE!! The first activity I found was from Elementary Excellence’s page. The students did 2 different Thanksgiving Math Problem Solving sheets. They had calculate how much food they would need in order to serve dinner to 40 people.

The 2nd activity was a multiplication game called Thanksgiving Multiplication 5-in-a-row I found on Teacher’s Planet‘s page.

Activity 3 was a super fun and cute craft called the Turkey Craftivity from More Time 2 Teach. Students solved math problems that were written on turkey feathers. They then got to color a turkey and the feathers to make a math turkey!

The 4th activity was a perimeter and area problem solving sheet called the Turkey Farm made my Mr Frasier. The students were given different perimeter and area problems while they drew out the dimensions of an ideal turkey farm.

The next activity was a multiples/skip counting activity. Students connected dots that were numbered with multiples of 3 to create a turkey. It was super cute and fun and who doesn’t love connecting dots? I found this activity called Skip Count by 3 Thanksgiving Turkey on Mister Reed’s store.

Activity 6 was non other than missing factor Thanksgiving task cards. I LOVE task cards and use them all the time! Students worked together to solve 24 different multiplication and division problems that had missing factors. I got this activity from Renee B – City Girl in Third.

The 7th activity was a problem solving sheet with a variety of 4th grade math problems. The fun part to this activity was that they gave 2 options for the answer for each problem. Each of the 2 answers had a different color. Based on what answer the student got, they used the color correlated on the sheet to color by number a turkey. If they got all of the answers correct the turkey would look like the picture below. If they got an answer wrong, something would be colored incorrectly. The activity was called 4th Grade Thanksgiving Math Color by Number and can be found on Mathmatic Fanatic’s page.

Finally, my last station was multiplication bingo with me, because who doesn’t love bingo?

They did super well both days on these activities and had a blast.

Tuesday morning, before our math stations, we worked on writing again. I handed out a fun writing template that had the words “I am thankful for…..” in the center of the page. I shared with the students what I’m thankful for. One of my teacher friends gave me this AMAZING idea for a poster. I hung it up for them all to read. They felt so special to see their name and I had so much fun watching them react.

I then had them watch a Kid President Youtube video on things to be thankful for. They then spent the next 25 minutes writing out everything they’re thankful for! I told them that I wasn’t going to collect or grade their writing. Their job would be to bring it home and share their writing with their friends and family. They worked so hard on these and were super excited to bring them home to share.

After our second day of math stations, we finished our afternoon with both Charlie Brown Thanksgiving cartoons. It was a great ending to a fun short week.

I am exhausted (and I’m really sorry if some of this doesn’t make any sense) and ready to get a nap in before the fun of Black Friday shopping begins! Happy Thanksgiving everyone, I hope you had a wonderful day. It’s this day that makes me remember how thankful I am for my life and for my job. I love being a teacher and love being able to share our class with you.

For more day to day action, go follow our class Instagram page @lifeoftherookieteacher

First Full Week With Some ELA Fun!

September 13, 2019September 13, 2019Posted in Education, UncategorizedTagged 4th Grade Life, Art Project, Back to School, Best Class Ever, Friday, Friyay, Reading, Reading Project, Reading Quilts, School Fun, School Life, School Projects, Story Elements, Teacher Life, Teacher Love, Teacher Resources, Teachers on Pinterest, TeachersPayTeachers, TPT Resources2 Comments

The first full week is complete and I am SHOT!! Don’t get me wrong, it was a great week but man I am exhausted with this new sleep/work routine.

I love my class! I knew that last week was great but that was only 2 days. I got to have a full week of “normality” with them and was able to see their real personalities. I have a few chatty kiddos but after my overly emotional class last year with multiple chatty kids, this feels like nothing! They are also super sweet and thoughtful! I had one of my amazing kids bring me a little pick me up this morning. (His mom is a teacher so that was a major part of it but still, it made my whole day!)

This week we started our first official reading unit/lesson. The main focus of this week was to talk about story structure/elements. Because these are 4th graders, most of them are pretty familiar with characters, setting, and plot. (Last year, even at the end of the year, some of my kids didn’t know what a setting was???) I didn’t want this week to be too dull and boring for them. I obviously love projects and doing something other than boring worksheets whenever I can so I had to look into my giant reading resources binder.

**Side note: My first year at my old school, we didn’t have the best reading curriculum (in my opinion of course.) The main idea of the curriculum was that there was one main target taught for 3 full weeks in a roll. Meaning that if the unit was on main idea, we taught main idea for 3 weeks. The down side to that, the curriculum gave us NOTHING to use for those 3 weeks. I spent many hours searching TPT and Pinterest that first year finding hundreds of activities, projects, and graphic organizers for each unit. It was a lot of work that year but I have so many great resources to use now!**

One thing that I found in the binder was a graphic organizer that I actually got from my mom (who has been teaching for 23 years.) She copied it from one of her reading resource books she bought from some teacher store (life before TPT and Pinterest.) The organizer was in the shape of a quilt square. I’m not exactly sure what it was originally made for but my mom used it to share books and certain chapters students would read. I used it as a way to share story elements from different books they have read to practice our week’s topic strategy.

They took the organizer and put the title, author, and rating (that they gave out of 5 stars) in the middle. I then had them share the setting, characters, and plot from the book. Finally, they wrote about their favorite part. Once they were finished they got to color and decorate there squares. I did this last year and took all of their quilt squares to make a giant quilt on the wall. I have yet to post their squares this year but most of them finished and did an AMAZING job. (Again, incredible kids!)

This week was a little crazy trying to get back into the groove of things but these kids made it so fun and easy. I am so excited to get back and see them on Monday!! I just have all of my fingers crossed that they stay this sweet and awesome!

Happy Friday friends!!

Because the summer is over and we are officially back, I am now back to posting as much as I can on my school’s instagram page! Go follow me at @lifeoftherookieteacher to see all of my day to day stories and pictures of my awesome class and our adventures!!